Search engine optimization is a technique to improve the performance of your site in search results. You may have wonderful content, but it’s no use without people seeing it. Search engines are the easy way to reach the interested audience to promote your content. In addition to organic search engines like Google, nowadays social networking sites also have their own search engines that take a bigger role in promoting content.
Optimizing your WordPress site for organic and social search engines is a relatively easy task with tons of plugins available for each individual theme, such as XML sitemap generation, webmaster tools verification, and social sharing.
WordPress and SEO
WordPress by default offers a search engine friendly platform for building sites compared to most other site builders. Also, there are many free and premium SEO plugins available to optimize a WordPress site. Searching for “SEO” will result in more than 1000 active plugins in WordPress plugin repository and finding the featured one for your site is not an easy task.
WordPress SEO Plugins
Some plugins offer minimal features, while others offer a power pack with all sorts of SEO-related features.
Why Yoast SESO?
The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is one of the simplest and most effective plugins to improve search engine rankings, especially Google. We are using it for years and recommend giving it a try. In this article, we will discuss the features of the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin that outperforms other plugins for the following reasons:
- The Yoast SEO plugin offers a packaged solution to boost your WordPress site directly from content creation.
- One of the most popular plugins with over 5 million active installs.
- It is a free plugin with the most advanced features needed to improve the search performance of your site.
- It is updated regularly based on user-reported issues and search engine updates. Yoast is quick to update features according to Google and stands out from other plugins like All in One SEO .
- The webmaster tools verification and XML sitemap options are very useful without the need for additional plugins.
- Publisher optimization allows users to check and correct errors even before publishing the post.
- Enabling the open graph for social sharing allows you to share the posts with attractive images.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Features
Once installed and activated, the plugin will add a new menu item called “SEO” with the following subsections.
- General
- search appearance
- Social
- Instruments
- Cousin
The plugin will also add a menu in the top admin toolbar named “SEO” which you can remove from the “General” settings section. After installation, you can follow the initial setup wizard and change settings later from the plugin settings page.
SEO Offer: Optimize your site with the special 14-day free trial of Semrush Pro .
General configuration
The general settings have the following features on different tabs:
Dashboard – Check the SEO status of your site in the dashboard section. You can find notifications and errors here.
Features – This is an important section of the plugin where you can enable or disable the plugin features.